The Stems protocol

Transcript

okay hello everyone thank you for coming to this talk I'm here to tell you about the stems protocol which is a protocol about decentralized collaborative creativity so let me start this by introducing myself a lot of times I go to these talks and I have no idea the person's background and I can't put it in context so I'm a third culture kid I was born and raised in Morocco I went to a French school there and then I moved to the US for college and then since then I've been hopping around and I think it's relevant because for a cultural project in in these decentralized environments I think it's important to be comfortable

in all kinds of different cultures and in terms of crypto I did some open source I wrote some open source code for Cosmos in 2018 and then most recently I worked on a defy project on cello called Mobius um and although I'm an engineer by trade I like all kinds of artistic things like I like to freestyle rap uh sing and then more recently with stems down I've gone into production as well and I also want to preface this by saying I don't pretend to be an NFC expert it is a very rapidly changing environment so take everything I say with a grain of salt okay what's wrong with sorry

what's wrong with music um so I think this is this meme is kind of sad because it's very true if you guys have musician friends it's actually very hard to to make money with music um it's one of the most backwards and inefficient uh Industries out there so some numbers to illustrate that if you think about the happiness that music generates or like creates in people's lives and you compare that to what Facebook creates and then you look at the revenue numbers so Facebook generates 100 billion dollars of Revenue yearly whereas the entire music industry all around the world generates about a quarter of that and then uh in terms of like how much of a power law it is only 0.2 percent of

artists on Spotify make more than 50k a year so 99.8 of people on Spotify can't make a living off of that and then on top of this three major labels pretty much control all of the uh all of the music that you that you tend to listen to on Spotify so how can web3 music help in the case of music nfts it's a very low effort uh additional income stream for artists because low effort in the sense that you already have the music produced you already have the audio files you just need to add metadata and make them into nfts uh it's so also music music is a very composable art form so people have been remixing other people's songs and making

music together for a long time and and blockchain kind of makes this uh more uh efficient you can reward the people involved more properly and then it's also traceable so for instance if you want to wanted to prove that you were Drake's first ever fan and you bought the nft for the first album you have the actual verifiable proof another thing that's cool is uh is is transparency so it's transparency in the sense that you have this public Ledger where people can go and look at transactions and so if there are middlemen you know exactly how much they're getting you know who's getting what

um and if they're like for instance for instance songwriters involved Etc you know how the artist uh kind of rewards the people that work with them one of the coolest things for me is the artist fan community so for instance I bought uh one of one of my friends music nfts a few months ago and he's based in in the UK but I know everything he's doing like I know his tour plans his Audi like how he plans on growing his audience and I've kind of became friends with his fans as well which is kind of cool and there's this aligned incentive where if the artists you believe in grows the nft you have also grows in in value so what are stems I'll just let Charlie puth explain it to you what if there was

a song that started off like [Music] and then a weird bass thing like wow wow and the drums are really simple like what everybody tilt your phone horizontally I had this idea in the song you would hear my voice over here I could see you over here and then you would hear it on the other side of your phone over here this is what it sounds like so far [Music] you got it

yeah hopefully you got it but uh it's like basically the the first things he was doing with his mouth and then showing the stems on on the on Ableton those are those are stems how do I make this there you go what if there was a song that started okay and then so whether we decided to make the stems into nft so we think that if we were to move the if we want to move music onto web 3 we basically need the music to be made on chain like uh we

don't believe that the incentives for a user to go on audios versus Spotify like even if you know that the artist makes a little bit more money if if you can if you pay less then you have access to more money better more music and better recommendation systems you're just going to use that software so we think that yeah Music Creation is important so focusing on the stems allows us to go like to The Matrix like the source of the music and then there's some cool stuff like we can have information about the stems at the kind of level of the stems it's very granular you can track like the key BPM isrc code and all these details about the actual audio file at the stem level and then you can have stem level rights

attribution so basically publishing recording rights royalty is defined at the stem level and then you can also have that uh impact how the derivative art is is like rewarding the various people who have ownership of it and then there's also a cool side effect which is there's a natural Rarity hierarchy to stems so if you're minting a collection and you don't know what you're getting like based on whether you're getting a like guitar riff or like you'd rather get a lead vocal or guitar than just a random background background kick which is kind of like when you're minting a pfp you want to have the better attributes okay so this talk is about the stems protocol uh not this not stems down so I

don't know if people here are familiar with what a protocol is but basically this this uh Paradigm of focusing on protocols versus platforms so for instance in the case of ethereum uh the protocol is ethereum protocol and then an ethereum node that you would run a run on your computer would be a client that interacts with that protocol that's the kind of platform in the case of uni swap the protocol is the source code that you find on GitHub and and the app like the platform is what you interact with on the the platform and other example is like lens so lens protocol the decentralized graph is the protocol and then lens friends is the wrapper that kind of allows you to interact with it so in our case stems Dao is the kind

of project that builds the platform promotes curated artist releases and just grows the community grows the brand around all of this whereas the protocol is just a set of rules that allow you to make music with others by interacting directly with the blockchain so what's what is this uh this thing I'm talking about the so we're basically for this for this protocol we take a song that is either already released or unreleased and we BR we take the the pieces of the song so like the samples the stems the Snippets and we make them into an nft collection so each stem or sample is an nft and then uh that collection is released and minted and people other artists can

come in use the stems and make different songs with those stems like either use all of them or use some of them add some stems and then make a new song and then if the original artist approves that new song uh that that song can be Minted as an nft intern okay so if you've still following me until now good job it's going to get a little uglier for a bit but just stay with me um so it's essentially our smart contracts architecture is based on a few real-life Notions that we're kind of encapsulating via VIA different smart contracts so we have projects which is which represents one or more artists and then so a project deploys a contract

which is essentially the only entity that can release stem collections uh and then they also deploy a song contract which allows people to use the stems from the collection and release songs with that artist kind of like a featuring it's like a Unchained featuring uh but yeah I mean if this is confusing if think about it as the artist all you do is you so you release stem nfts and then you deploy this contract that lets people release songs with your stem nfts and then you can approve the songs that you like basically on the blockchain on the chain um so in in the next steps we want to we want to be able to uh allow like a

second layer so that when people release a song that is using other uh someone else's stems that song itself can become a collection that other people can can build build on and just like continuously let the composability happen we also want to integrate the the stems uh songs kind of at the protocol level with uh entities from lens because we think the social kind of Route is the next Frontier for blockchain that's kind of the Avenue we're going for uh we also want to build the tools for for non-creative artists to drop uh kind of Collections and interact with the protocol right now we only have that for like established artists that are curated and then we want to expand

beyond music into other kind of video media and other media so this thing is developed by stems Dao a lot of people are asking me like why do you want to do a dow just like want to slap the name on there because it's trendy but it's actually there's there's a very good use case for us in terms of in terms of the the governance uh so we we think that a handful of people shouldn't own a project or the majority of a project with this kind of scope and vision like it basically embodying decentralized culture or like culture in the decentralized world that should be something that many many different people should have say in and then most particularly like the artists that drop

music with us we want to give them ownership and governance power so imagine if the top YouTube creators and the top Tick Tock creators uh how to say or like had a portion of YouTube and tick tock uh like what what would happen would it be a higher quality platform we we think that it would increase the quality of the content and like decrease the kind of necessity to spend a lot of time on on the platforms more like the quality to quantity ratio would change and so because these are the reasons we actually don't care that much about the token aspect like the speculative aspect um and we're exploring kind of non-transferable non-speculative

governance uh governance assets if you want to get involved with the stems dial you can check stems down on Twitter the main thing you can do with us I don't know if there are any musicians in the room is to make music with our stems which come from artists we have poolside we dropped some standardized Harris Cole and a lot of different artists from various genres and then if you don't make music you can still get involved by joining supporting the musicians uh spreading the words sharing some content on Discord we have some people that made friends on our Discord by you know went raving with them so yeah just check it out and then this is some some uh like never said before Alpha we haven't dropped any nfts

yet it's been a long time in the making and so because of that we're we're going to make it special so just stay tuned for that and these are my handles to continue the conversation I also have a video that I can show but I don't think I have it's like a minute now okay the quality is not great on Google but hopefully it's guessing [Music] turn turn up

turn up turn up justice [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music]

video the idea is like the thank you [Applause] thank you Haytham so questions here we go hey is it important for the artist to approve how his stem is being used uh so you can actually still release a song without them approving it but so typically an artist has very strong creative opinions so imagine you're like a a very specific type of organica house artist and someone drops a trap remix of your song and you just don't want that

tied to you so you can filter basically it's like uh accepting a featuring right you can't force someone to to work with you if they don't want to creatively so it's kind of like this filtering where there will be the other songs that you can explore still like we're not blocking people but the ones that uh the song the original artist likes they get an extra kind of check mark and the the actual implementation of that is their wallet address gets retroactively whitelisted basically sir yeah uh I just wanted to know that like will there be like a Marketplace for

this thing like open see where yeah uh stems people can collect the stems and merge them yes okay and then like if someone is integrating someone else temps so how would that process work out in the nft process uh if someone is integrating someone else's stems yeah to would you like new music so yeah so basically when you release a new song using someone else stems you you map you select the stems that you used so if you interact with the blockchain yourself you actually have to to to like put in the token ID but we have we have a platform with a UI that gives you like the stems from from whatever collection your song is tied to and then you just

pick them and then like we tie that to the Token ID so that on the blockchain your song is links to the stems that you used and the collection of the the those times but then how can this be enforced right so suppose like there is a music right so someone can be ethical and use those terms but then most people like just take the music and merge it with the music right check the music and merge it with not using the nft infrastructure yeah so if they basically so stems down incentivizes uh the people to make these remixes so the the truth is that you can always steal other people's music and not not uh do things legally so the way

we're doing it is we're focusing on the care not the stick so if you re-upload uh if you use the protocol via our platform we have incentives so for instance the fifth game we did the winner the Remake like the person that made the remix that the original artist liked the most well like they got to open for that artist at a private event by stands down and the idea is that those incentives can be more streamlined via token or some form of other kind of like maybe a pfp nft or I mean we have a lot of things in the work for that but essentially just in like give people an incentive to to do do it that way and then when there's enough traffic from all the content content being being made

people are just going to want to release that way to get the traffic and get approved by the artist you know it's like kind of like a way to get that artist featuring which is the most interesting part of this because you can find stems everywhere yeah I'm struggling with Game Theory thank you Hayden thank you thank you very much